Preface

This book is written for business people who prepare proposals (and for business people who evaluate them). If you are a consultant who owns your own business or who works for a firm of one or one thousand, if you are an internal consultant who “sells” services to your own organization, if you are a business executive who “sells” ideas to your management, you will benefit greatly from this book.

If you are like most people, you probably find selling your services or ideas in a proposal both demanding and difficult. Your proposals not only take too long to prepare, they are often written when you least want to write them—at night or on weekends, because during the day you are occupied with everything else that you do: conducting projects, furthering relationships, developing people. Proposal writing often seems like extra work, additional but necessary effort to get selected to perform projects so that you can be successful in your intensely competitive business.

Perhaps equally frustrating is the margin of difference between winning and losing. Hundreds of people consulting in the private sector have told me the same thing: the difference between winning and coming in second is very small, often just two to five points on a hundred-point scale. Those who place a close second never get back the upfront costs of proposal development. What they do get is second place. The situation in the public sector is similar. For a recent proposal to manage a $30 million project for a U.S. government agency, the difference between the winner and the second-place also-ran was five points out of one thousand—one-half of 1 percent!

What accounts for this difference? Sometimes it’s price, of course, sometimes your particular methodology or your qualifications. But all too often, it’s something much less tangible and rarely part of the evaluation criteria, whether those criteria are written down or in the buyers’¹ heads. That something has to do with relationships, with the buyers’ feeling that you are right, that you understand, that you are compatible. So, yes, price is frequently a consideration, as is expertise. But someone is always or can always be less costly, and the world is full of experts. Price and expertise get you in the running, but they don’t ensure that you’ll win.

The goal of this book is twofold:

1. Specifically, to get you the additional two to five points necessary to win

2. Generally, to increase your win rate, your hit rate

By how much? That’s impossible to say, of course, though some data suggest that it might be considerable. The concepts in Writing Winning Business Proposals (WWBP) are the same ones taught in a two-day program that has been offered to organizations large and small in more than 25 countries on five continents over the last 20 years. The largest organization tracked over one year the performance of those who had taken the two-day program and those who hadn’t. Following are the results. (See Figure P.1.)

When you calculate the number of proposals won by the number of proposals submitted, the participants’ hit rate percentage (proposals won divided by proposals submitted) was 30 points higher. More interesting is that when hit rate was weighted using the monetary value of the proposals won compared to the total value submitted, the hit rate percentage more than doubled, suggesting that participants were able to sell higher-value work than those who had not taken the program. As you read the contents of WWBP, you’ll clearly understand why.

FIGURE P.1 Those who completed the two-day training program based on this book’s concepts had more than double the hit rate of those who did not.

This Edition

In its first two editions, Writing Winning Business Proposals sold 50 percent more copies than its nearest “competitor” and almost four times the number of copies that publishers normally consider a bestseller—not for novels, of course, but for books of its kind. Those figures attest to the relatively wide readership WWBP has enjoyed. More important, the book’s sales have made possible this third edition and therefore the opportunity to continue to improve on the previous two.

Specifically, this third edition includes four kinds of improvements:

1. The chapters have been considerably revised, not so much to change the overall content but to improve how that content is delivered—how it teaches you to think about and develop your proposals. During the eight years between editions, the slide deck used in the training program has been revised a dozen times. Although the concepts did not change, the slides themselves changed considerably, helping participants to understand those concepts more quickly and to apply them more strategically. WWBP has been similarly revised. For example, those who have read (or have taught from) the previous edition will note that the visuals in Chapter 9 now clearly indicate how a background section can be quickly constructed from the cells of the Logics Worksheet.

2. Related to the above, every visual has been redrawn, again to provide additional clarity about the concepts and how they fit together during the proposal-development process.²

3. Two new appendices have been added. Appendix G, “Reading RFPs,” discusses important strategies for responding to Requests for Proposals. Appedix H, “A Worksheet for Qualifying Your Lead,” includes criteria for determining your positioning and, based on that positioning, a forecast of your prospects for winning.

4. Substantial learning materials are now available for download that heretofore could be obtained only through the two-day training course. To access these downloads, visit: http://mhprofessional.com/freed. As of this writing, the downloads include:

The Logics, Psychologics, and Themes Development Worksheets, which should be printed in landscape in 11″ × 17″ or A4 (or larger—for example, poster size, which is ideal for team use). The previous edition contained only the individual cells of the Logics and Psychologics Worksheets; this download includes the complete worksheets.

A handbook for completing every cell on every worksheet

Guidelines for conducting Red Team Reviews

A discussion of deliverables and benefits and the differences between them

A glossary listing all the key terms in this book

A small Excel application that includes criteria for determining your positioning with the potential client and, based on that positioning, a forecast of your prospects for winning

An elaboration on the content in Appendix D that discusses the differences between proposals and recommendation (or final) reports and provides strategies for composing the latter

A discussion of Stakeholder Matrices, which can be used during proposal development, the engagement, and account planning to improve your positioning

Acknowledgments

One doesn’t write a book like this in isolation, and over the course of many years on this effort, I have numerous people to thank:

Consultants from ECS Limited in New Delhi and KPMG in Chicago, who were helpful in providing opportunities to test my initial concepts, and the hundreds of consultants from A. T. Kearney’s and IMS Consulting’s American, European, and Asia-Pacific offices, who helped me refine those concepts

The many graduate students at Iowa State University, who have served as a laboratory to develop my ideas, as well as the university itself, which provided release time so that the project could be completed

Mike Hora, pricer and negotiator extraordinaire, whose insights about pricing were helpful in composing Chapter 13

Barbara Minto for her work in what she calls the Minto Pyramid Principle, which forms the conceptual basis for Chapter 5 as well as the discussion in Chapter 11 and Appendix D

David Maister, whose ideas about the professional-services firm and the selling of professional services saturate this and former editions

The large team of McGraw-Hill editors, designers, and proofreaders—especially our project editor, Susan Moore, whose tireless efforts have significantly contributed to the quality of the book

—Richard Freed ([email protected])
Ames, Iowa